Personally I don't partake - but they get a value in it, I guess. Who am I to judge?
I don't think we'll ever even know how many NFT projects there were out there, all taking up space on the various chains, all shilling garbage artwork, all promising all manner of shit from video games to magazines to comics to television series, many of which raised huge sums of money, virtually all of which is now gone. And it's easy to point and laugh at the people who thought these things were anything but scams, but also, in a better world, we wouldn't let tons of people be scammed like this. Being vulnerable to certain kinds of hype shouldn't give other people permission to rob you blind.
Its secondary value is buying and selling legal goods and services on the internet without having to deal with credit card companies, but only for techbros.
Nah. Far more people use crypto for speculation than for actually illicit purposes.
Your opinion on the validity or ethics of that utility has no impact on the fact that for some people they have utility.
the majority of people don't have formal training in probability and statistics, not to mention limit theorems and finance, so who cares how they view the stock market? I mean, I care, in the sense of educating people but most people don't really want to put the time in.
stocks and gambling both have risk, but only stocks reward many/most types of risk; gambling does not. The expected value of stocks is positive; gambling is not.
What people are trying to say about stocks is that they are stochastic, and so is gambling.
on the larger topic, Crypto also does not reward risk or offer a positive expected value. It's stochastic nature is driven by the changing opinions people have about it, or secondary effects from how much other stochastic markets might rely on it. Mining bitcoins is stochastic from the point of view of a miner, but not really from the point of view of the market or at any scale, but without a productive use case providing a reward, no postive expected value and the reward for risk ("you got a coin") is not above the cost of mining, at least not for long.
And who said I am not addicted? I don't do hard drugs but I am certainly addicted to coffee, sugar and maybe other habits I (moderately) indulge in but I would be very pissed off if someone else would try to take away from me.
But outside of a couple of meme articles about how "someone bought a house with BTC!" the only use case I can find for crypto is money laundering or ransomeware.
The thing about gambling is it's a zero sum game. It doesn't enable any "real" productivity, it's just passing money around (with skimming off the top).
ML/AI isn't necessarily like that, it can be actually useful. Nevermind chatbots, we've already see how "AI" is useful in products for the last decade (e.g. google search results and extracting structured data out of emails, just to name a couple).
The only similarity is the hype/confusion cycle. Lots of crypto people got rich because they were in the right place at the right time, and they want to be there with the chatbot wave next.
The fact that AI/ML can be judged on real utility will limit some of this, and I think these crypto people will be in for a rude awakening if they think they can replicate their success here. With crypto the "game" of gambling / speculating meant that there was a lot of demand for ongoing endeavors, but once people realize that low effort ChatGPT reskins don't deliver anything tangible it'll be pretty obvious the emperor has no clothes.
You can't buy/trade ChatGPT prompts, after all - unless, perhaps, you were to create prompt NFTs?
AI is way too overhyped and also completely not understood. I think most people here immediately think of some kind of genetic algorithm when they hear AI but even a simple thermostat could be marketed as AI even if all it does is turn on the furnace when some thermometer provides a low signal. The only thing reading AI on a product tells you is that there is software.
I'm unconvinced GPT will remain as a mass market tool. Google Docs got super popular because people don't want to fork out like $50 for microsoft word; they're not going to fork over $15/month to do web searches.
"Lihe Pharmaceutical Technology Company, based in Wuhan, Hebei Province, China, was charged with fentanyl trafficking conspiracy and international money laundering, along with Chinese nationals Mingming Wang, 34, who is the alleged holder for three bitcoin accounts shared by sales agents for Lihe Pharmaceutical, and Xinqiang Lu, 40, the alleged recipient of funds via Western Union on the company’s behalf. " [1]
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-...
Fiat money derives its value from what you say, indeed. It is traded on exchanges because of that. But fungibility is only one of several factors. Money should also serve as store of value, but how long is highly debatable and the point.